Jodie Foster sat for an extended interview on Nov. 30 at the Marrakech Film Festival, where she was honored with a tribute award. During the career retrospective, Foster reflected on her star-making turn in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and revealed why she thought Robert De Niro was “really uninteresting” when she first met the Oscar-winner.
Foster was just 12-years-old when she starred as adolescent sex worker Iris in Scorsese’s masterpiece. Having not done many roles beforehand, Foster was more than a little confused when faced with De Niro’s impenetrable Method approach.
“We’d run the lines and run the lines a second and third time,” Foster told the crowd. “And I’m sure maybe some of you have been here when Robert De Niro was here. One of our greatest American actors, so proud to have worked with him—not the most interesting person on earth,” she continued, to appreciative laughter.
‘When Can I Go Home?’
“At that time, he was very much in character, the way he was in those days,” Foster recounted. “So he was really uninteresting and I remember having these lunches with him and being like, ‘What is happening? When can I go home?’ And he wouldn’t really be able to talk to me, so I would talk to the waiters and the people in the restaurants.”
But it wasn’t long before Foster saw the value in De Niro’s eccentric methodology. “He finally walked me through improvisation by the time we had our third lunch together, and it opened my eyes to what acting could be,” she said. “And I realized at 12, ‘Oh, it’s my fault because I haven’t brought enough to the table.’ I’ve just been saying lines and waiting for my next line and acting naturally, but building a character is something different. And I remember how excited I was, I remember being kind of sweaty and excited and giggly and coming back up into the hotel room to meet my mom and saying, ‘I’ve had this epiphany.’ And I think from there, everything changed.”
‘I Would Never Have Chosen to Be an Actor’
When the film premiered in Cannes, Foster, who speaks fluent French, paid her own way to the festival along with her mother. It ended up being a stroke of luck, because Scorsese, De Niro, and co-star Harvey Keitel “were really paranoid” about the controversy Taxi Driver was courting. “We all did the press conference together, but then after the press conference, they all got too scared, and they wouldn’t leave their rooms at the Hotel du Cap,” Foster said. “So I ended up doing all the interviews in French for the entire team of Taxi Driver!”
Foster concluded by reflecting on her decades-long career, admitting that she wouldn’t have picked her profession if not for her mother. “I would never have chosen to be an actor, I don’t have the personality of an actor. I’m not somebody that wants to dance on a table and, you know, sing songs for people,” she said. “It’s actually just a cruel job that was chosen for me as a young person that I don’t remember starting. So right there, it makes my work a little bit different because I am not interested in acting just for the sake of acting. If I was on a desert island, I think probably the last thing I would ever do is act. So I was just trying to survive.”
